Discours de réception à l’Académie française

"Inaugural Discourse at the French Academy"

Pierre Rétat

1Montesquieu was received into the Académie Française on 24 January 1728. Much has
been written about the difficulties he encountered when he put forward his
candidacy, and on the opposition made by the Cardinal de Fleury, alerted to the
daring content of the Lettres persanes.

2Much less has been said about his reception oration, which is nevertheless worthy
of interest in several respects. Ostensibly conforming to the extremely
constricting conventions of the genre (eulogy of the departed member one is
succeeding, eulogy of the Academy’s founder, Cardinal de Richelieu, and of the
king, the “protector” of the Academy), he partly eludes them and adroitly plays
around them. The brevity of the text is remarkable: it is barely half as long as
the medium length of speeches at the time. By giving a condensed and allusive
form to the eulogy of Louis Silvestre de Sacy, whom he succeeded in chair number
2, Montesquieu seems to have wished to defer to Mme de Lambert, a friend of
both, who had already published a long eulogy in the Mercure
de France. The original way he deals with the other obligatory aspects
is much more significant; his eulogy of the great protectors is almost entirely
indirect, and is addressed with veiled irony to the Academy, established as he
puts it to devote to them a “formal appreciation” (culte
réglé), for which he expresses an excessive and suspect admiration.
Finally, he opposes the “king” and the “hero” in Louis XIV in terms in which can
be subtly inferred past and future condemnations.

3One can thus judge that with consummate prudence Montesquieu delivered an oration
that was both quite academic and un-academic, and in any case quite
original.

4The very incisive response of J.-R. Malet (or Mallet), director of the Academy,
was not published (contrary to custom) after Montesquieu’s oration. It can be
found beginning in 1730 in the Recueils (collections) of
academic documents.